By Peter Kornbluh

The marbled corridors of the venerable Tribunal of Justice in
downtown Santiago, deadly silent during the years of the military
dictatorship, are now filled with the bustle of lawyers, clerks,
police detectives and ministers pursuing past crimes of state.
Chilean judges are not known for giving press conferences, but on
December 13 several dozen reporters from local and international news
organizations were waiting when Judge Juan Guzmán stepped out
of his office at 1:35 pm after filing his decision on prosecuting
Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

"Pinochet has been declared mentally fit to undergo criminal
investigation," Judge Guzmán told the large crowd, which
included victims of repression and their families. He then announced
that he had ordered Pinochet placed under house arrest and indicted
for nine disappearances and one murder relating to Operation
Condor--a Chilean-led consortium of secret police agencies that
conducted hundreds of acts of state-sponsored terrorism in the
Southern Cone and around the world in the mid- and late 1970s. Gasps
echoed through the hall, then a ripple of applause, and then the
sound of shrieks and tears as those who had lost husbands and wives,
fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, during Pinochet's
seventeen-year regime reacted. When the Chilean Supreme Court
announced on January 4 that it had rejected Pinochet's appeal of
Guzmán's ruling, mayhem once again broke out in the same hall.

The indictment has the most immediate meaning for those directly
touched by the actions of Pinochet's military. For the relatives of
those missing and murdered, and those who survived the torture camps,
the Pinochet prosecution is a vindication of their efforts to keep
the cause of truth and justice alive in a society that has largely
preferred to dismiss, rather than confront, Chile's dark past. Coming
the same week that the Chilean Congress was finalizing a law that
would provide a modest monthly payment as compensation to thousands
of people imprisoned and tortured during the Pinochet era, it offered
a far more important moral reparation to these victims: the
possibility that Pinochet would actually be judged.

The decision to prosecute Pinochet comes amid a flurry of activity
around the cause of human rights. Since November, almost every day
has brought a groundbreaking legal ruling, new indictment, dramatic
announcement or event that has maintained the focus of the nation
on the horrors of the past. The debate on whether and how to
redress the human rights crimes of the Pinochet era--a debate long
repressed by the Chilean military, right wing and post-Pinochet
civilian governments--has escalated exponentially. "This is a
Pandora's box," says Elizabeth Lira, one of Chile's leading
psychologists and a member of the national commission that recently
compiled a massive report on torture by Pinochet's forces. "I don't
know where it stops."

The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture on
which Lira served, known as the Valech Commission for its chairman,
Monsignor Sergio Valech, submitted its findings to the government in
November. The 1,200-page report catalogued more than 27,000
confirmed cases of imprisonment and the most grotesque forms of
torture, which, it noted:
was used as a tool for political control through suffering.
Irrespective of any possible direct or indirect participation in acts
that could be construed as illegal, the State resorted to torture
during the entire period of the military regime. Torture sought to
instill fear, to force people to submit, to obtain information, to
destroy an individual's capacity for moral, physical, psychological,
and political resistance and opposition to the military regime. In
order to "soften people up"--according to the torturers' slang--they
used different forms of torture.... The victims were humiliated,
threatened, and beaten; exposed to extreme cold, to heat and the sun
until they became dehydrated; to thirst, hunger, sleep deprivation;
they were submerged in water mixed with sewage to the point of
asphyxiation; electric shocks were applied to the most sensitive
parts of their bodies; they were sexually humiliated, if not raped by
men and animals, or forced to witness the rape and torture of their
loved ones.

On the evening of Sunday, November 28, Chilean President Ricardo
Lagos went on Chilean television to release the report to the nation.
(It was posted on a government website, but no hard copies or
translations as yet exist.) From the report, Lagos told Chileans, he
now understood the "magnitude of the suffering, the insanity of the
intense cruelty, the immensity of the pain," and offered a small
compensation package and free healthcare for the victims as a way to
"repair the wounds." In a Chilean variant of Santayana's famous
dictum, Lagos eloquently concluded that in order to avoid repeating
the past Chileans could "never again deny it."

For the government, the torture report and the compensation package
fulfilled Lagos's commitment to address the Pinochet era and resolve
the festering human rights issue once and for all. Instead of
closure, however, the issuance of the report has fully opened the
door to a national dialogue over the crimes of the military
dictatorship and those civilian collaborators who facilitated the
regime's dirty work. The highly contentious debate, playing out in a
flood of forums, interviews, articles, meetings, resolutions and
declarations across government agencies and civil society, revolves
around two essential issues: public accountability for both
government and nongovernment contributors to the repression of the
Pinochet era; and judicial reckoning for those military officers who
gave the orders, held the electrodes, pulled the triggers and
disappeared the bodies.

At the center of the growing clamor is the Chilean military. When the
first postdictatorship Report of the Chilean National Commission on
Truth and Reconciliation was released in 1991, documenting the
murders and disappearances of 3,100 Chileans, the military (still
commanded by Pinochet himself) denounced its "bias and distortion"
and dismissed its conclusions. Now, under the leadership of Commander
in Chief Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre, the military is waging a concerted
public relations effort to de-Pinochetize the armed forces and
distance itself from the egregious crimes committed by its own
institutions.

Indeed, denial is no longer a politically viable option. On November
5 General Cheyre pre-empted the release of the torture report by
publishing an institutional mea culpa in Chile's leading newspaper,
La Tercera. He abandoned the military's line--promoted by Pinochet
himself--that if abuses had been committed they were isolated acts of
individual officers and soldiers. The military, he wrote, had taken
"the difficult but irrevocable decision to assume institutional
responsibility for all past actions that warrant punishment and were
morally unacceptable." On December 7, after the report was released,
Cheyre used the graduation of an Army cadet class as a
well-publicized forum to disavow the atrocities of the Pinochet era,
inviting victims and their families to sit in the front row and hear
speeches from leading activists and lawyers--and Cheyre himself--on
respect for human rights.

But other pro-Pinochet sectors of Chilean society still refuse to
acknowledge complicity. As The Report of the National Commission on
Political Imprisonment and Torture pointedly noted, the horrors of
the Pinochet regime "had the support, explicit at times, and almost
always implicit, of the only branch of the State that was not a
formal part of that regime: the judiciary." With their hallowed
institution accused of ignoring or rejecting all legal entreaties
from human rights victims and their families during the
dictatorship, the eighteen members of the Chilean Supreme Court met
to study the Valech Commission report on December 8. In a statement
released the next day, the president of the Court, Marcos
Libedinsky, defensively rejected all charges. There was "no credible
evidence," he claimed, "that distinguished magistrates could have
conspired with third parties to allow for unlawful detentions,
torture, kidnappings, and murders."

The Supreme Court position so strained credulity that even the
Christian Democratic Party--itself a collaborator with the Pinochet
regime after the coup--denounced it as "sad, disheartening,
lamentable, and almost shameful"; and President Lagos openly
criticized the judges for failing to admit that they had acquiesced
in the atrocities of the military dictatorship. But when the
government party newspaper, La Nación, published a cover story
titled "La Cara Civil de la Tortura"--The Civil Face of
Torture--along with photographs of what the paper called "los Top
Ten" Chilean civilian elites who had facilitated Pinochet's
repression, the editor was publicly berated by Lagos administration
officials for practicing inflammatory journalism.

That action, as well as others, suggests that the Lagos
administration is sensitive to rumbling on the right that the fallout
of the Valech report be contained. "The government has undertaken a
major challenge with uncertain consequences over which it could
easily lose control," stated a December 10 lead editorial in Chile's
conservative daily, El Mercurio (owned by Agustín Edwards, who
is listed as numero uno on the Top Ten list of regime collaborators).
The torture report, Edwards's paper complained, was supposed to
"soothe the wounds, not reopen them."

What really rattles the Chilean right and the military is not an
accounting but the prospect of being held accountable. In his
televised speech releasing the torture report, President Lagos
conspicuously avoided all references to identifying the torturers and
prosecuting them. His administration soon announced that the
testimonies and working papers of the Valech Commission would be kept
confidential for fifty years--a decision that the commissioners
oppose, and that has raised suspicions among Chile's human rights
groups that the government is sequestering critical evidence to
impede future judicial proceedings. Indeed, various associations and
organizations representing Pinochet's many victims are indignant over
the government's efforts to shift the focus away from prosecution of
those responsible for human rights crimes while pushing a minimal
financial compensation package--about $190 a month--for torture
victims. "Justice is the principal method of reparation," insists
Pedro Matta, a survivor of the infamous Villa Grimaldi torture camp.

It remains to be seen how, or even if, Chile's tribunals will process
thousands of torture cases that could derive from the Valech report.
But it is clear from several recent rulings that the momentum for
justice that would bring to trial some of the worst human rights
abusers under the Pinochet regime can no longer be suppressed. In
November the Supreme Court ruled that the amnesty law passed by
Pinochet to protect his officers from prosecution for human rights
crimes did not apply to the case of Miguel Angel Sandoval, a leftist
disappeared by the DINA, Pinochet's secret police. The decision
clears the way for the imprisonment of former DINA director Manuel
Contreras and sets a precedent for other cases involving officers who
had hoped to hide behind the amnesty law. In December, Lieut. Col.
Mario Manríquez Bravo was indicted as the "intellectual
author" of the murder of Chilean folk singer Victor Jara following
the September 11, 1973, coup. With his appeals rejected,
Manríquez has been incarcerated pending trial. And earlier
this month, ten high-ranking members of the DINA were indicted for
disappearing eight Chileans, who became part of Operation Colombo--a
crude, macabre effort to falsify the fates of 119 missing political
prisoners by arranging the appearance of corpses on the streets of
Buenos Aires and planting propaganda claiming that they had died in a
battle between militant leftists in Argentina.

Beyond the Condor prosecution, Pinochet himself has been the target
of significant legal proceedings that could lead to other trials on
terrorism and corruption charges. In early December a Chilean court
ruled that he could be prosecuted as the "intellectual author" of the
1974 car-bomb assassination in Buenos Aires of his immediate
predecessor as Army commander, Gen. Carlos Prats, and his wife. On
Christmas Eve a special investigation into Pinochet's illicit sources
of wealth determined that between 1985 and 2002 he had secretly
stashed $16 million--twice the previously reported amount--in several
accounts at the Riggs National Bank in Washington, DC. And on January
6 authorities raided Pinochet's office in downtown Santiago, finding
four false passports in his name and carting off computers and files
containing potential evidence. A decision to prosecute Pinochet on
charges of corruption, embezzlement and tax evasion is expected soon.

"He is a person who has finished his life in a miserable way,"
observes Elizabeth Lira. Indeed, as of January 5 the former dictator
finds himself under house arrest, with military police guarding the
doors of his country estate. At 89, he has lived long enough to read
a recent cover story in La Tercera--"Government and Army Plan Funeral
of Augusto Pinochet." There will be no official homage paid to the
former dictator. State funerals, the Lagos administration has made
clear, are reserved for presidents who were democratically elected.

Archived Sections

Working Groups

More from GPF

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.